Payment Review

Payment Review is an Express Checkout feature that identifies high-risk transactions and notifies you so that you can hold shipments until the risk has been evaluated by PayPal.

Note: Payment Review is not applicable to Direct Payment.

Handling Payment Review

You are immediately notified that a payment is under review and you should not ship merchandise or, in the case of electronic media, you should not allow download access while the payment is under review. You are notified of the resolution within 24 hours.

By checking the status of a transaction programmatically (as described below)

Checking the Status of a Transaction Programmatically

Check the Initial Status of a Transaction

Programmatically, the merchant can determine the status of a payment by checking the initial status of a transaction using any of the following the API operations (see the API reference):

DoExpressCheckoutPayment

DoReferenceTransaction

DoAuthorization

DoReauthorization

Note: You must use API version 58.0 or higher to obtain the initial status information provided by DoExpressCheckoutPayment, DoReferenceTransaction, DoAuthorization, or DoReauthorization.

To use payment review with the DoExpressCheckoutPayment, DoReferenceTransaction, DoAuthorization, and DoReauthorization PayPal API operations, you must:

Check the payment status in the response to the API operation; specifically, check whether PaymentStatus is set to Pending.

If the PaymentStatus is set to Pending, check whether the PendingReason is set to PaymentReview, because there are other reasons that a transaction may become pending. For example, an unsettled authorization's PaymentStatus is set to Pending; however, its PendingReason is set to authorization, which is not related to payment review.

If PaymentStatus is set to Pending and the PendingReason is set to PaymentReview, you should not ship merchandise or, in the case of electronic media, you should not allow download access.